Big Apple news dropped yesterday afternoon…Tim Cook is retiring as CEO, and Senior VP of hardware engineering John Ternus will take over that big chair. Engadget.com reports that this will happen September 1st. Cook will segue into an Executive Chairman role, so won’t completely disappear from the Apple universe. This is notable in one way as Ternus is 50…the same age as Cook when he took the reins in Cupertino, AND…Ternus worked for Steve Jobs at Apple. He will now be the last CEO of Apple who has had a direct connection to Steve Jobs. Ternus has kept a low profile, although he was featured in the rollout of the new MacBook Neo. He is credited with turning around the Macs and also had a big hand in Apple’s AirPods and Watch. 

Anthropic has announced that Amazon will pump another $5 billion into the company, bringing their total investment to $13 billion. There could be another $20 billion later, depending on benchmarks. According to tehcrunch.com, Anthropic has agreed to spend over $100 billion on Amazon Web Services over then next 10 years, getting them a new 5 gigawatts of computing capacity to train and run Claude. The deal specifically covers Amazon Trainium2 through Trainium4 chips, too…even though the 4 chip isn’t yet available. With ChatGPT now worth some $730 billion, venture capitalists have been offering Anthropic additional capital that would bring Anthropic’s valuation to $800 billion or more!

In other Amazon news, California is accusing Amazon of price fixing. Gizmodo.com says California Attorney General Rob Bonta is accusing the online giant of pressuring brands to increase prices for their products on other retailers’ websites so that Amazon would have a more competitive price. The allegations, which were made in a filing that is part of California’s ongoing antitrust lawsuit against Amazon and was unsealed on Monday, lay out a scheme in which Amazon used the leverage of its massive e-commerce platform to pressure companies into raising prices with other retailers or face punishment for failing to do so. According to the attorney general, Amazon demands a vendor “fix,” “correct,” “increase,” “raise,” or “look into” the prices of products on other retailers’ websites. The expectation is that the vendor will ultimately raise its prices everywhere but Amazon. To get that outcome, Amazon would allegedly threaten to punish the brand by restricting their advertising, demanding they pay compensation, or removing their products from Amazon altogether.

OpenAI has released Codex Chronicle for Macs. 9to5mac.com notes that this is something of a ‘super app.’ Right now, it is especially made for agentic coding. ChatGPT remains the more general AI chatbot app. The idea of Chronicle is to make Codex more aware of context without repeating details or being super specific with each prompt. It builds on memory, and that lets Codex learn from conversation history for context. It also can learn from recent screen context. In terms of privacy, Chronicle can be paused or disabled at any time from Codex’s menu bar app. However, OpenAI warns that Chronicle consumes rate limits quickly based on its current design.

I’m Clark Reid and you’re ‘Technified’ for now.